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A lazy attachment to the global status quo shouldn't keep the U.S. from re-evaluating its fundamental energy assumptions, including the supposed indispensability of Saudi oil. Saudi Arabia will always be an important oil power, but that doesn't mean that its leverage can't be significantly reduced, including by a cluster of countries that many people would have trouble locating on a map. Toward that end, the U.S. should make the Gulf of Guinea a strategic priority, promoting free markets and the rule of law there, encouraging American investment, providing a security presence, and — perhaps above all — getting over a sneering tendency to dismiss the strategic significance of anything African. After all, the Persian Gulf itself was a developmental backwater as recently as the 1960s, when few could imagine the importance it would attain over the next 30 years. The Gulf of Guinea is in a similar state today, a Third World afterthought primed to become a major market player. With the end of the Cold War, it has a greater openness to the market, making access easier for American companies. Meanwhile, technology unheard of 20 years ago has led to the rapid discovery and exploitation of new sources of oil there. These trends combine with several other features of the region to make West African oil a natural for the U.S.: Much of it is offshore, providing something of a buffer from political instability; it is easily delivered, via a quick jaunt across the Atlantic without straits or canals; and it is low in sulfur, providing the high gasoline yield preferred by U.S. refineries. All these factors suggest that the West African market, stretching from the Ivory Coast down to Angola, is ready to bloom. Paul Michael Wihbey of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies is a leading evangelist of West Africa's potential, and has created an African Oil Policy Initiative Group to try to wake up policymakers to the region's emerging importance. A soon-to-be released white paper reports, "At 1.5 million barrels per day, the amount of West African oil flowing to the United States approximates or exceeds the volume of U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia. Nigeria is the world's sixth-largest oil exporter and fifth-ranked provider of crude to the U.S. at over 900,000 b/d [barrels a day], while Angola, despite years of civil conflict, may produce close to one million b/d in 2002." Potential is almost everywhere in the region, even in the smaller nations. Until recently, no one would have mentioned Equatorial Guinea and oil in the same breath, but this country may soon be producing as much oil per capita as Saudi Arabia. The tiny island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is now believed to be sitting on reserves of 4 billion barrels of oil. A Chad-Cameroon pipeline will be pumping 250,000 barrels a day next year, and will actually be too small for potential volume. According to a U.S. National Intelligence Council estimate, 25 percent of American oil will be imported from sub-Saharan Africa by 2015. As Wihbey points out, if you want evidence of the strategic importance of West Africa, look no further than Chinese president Jiang Zemin's recent itinerary. In April, he visited Nigeria, bearing promises of trade, aid, and development projects. China has demonstrated the wherewithal to deliver on promises in the region: Three years ago, it completed a 1,500-kilometer pipeline in Sudan in almost record time. China may be pursuing strategic influence in West Africa as a way to cushion itself from the sort of dependency on Persian Gulf oil that is typical of East Asia. The Jiang visit begs for a counter-signal of high-level American interest. The U.S. eventually should declare the area a vital American national interest, perhaps as a prelude to creating a sub-regional command (on the model of Korea) with its home port in São Tomé and Príncipe, smack in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea. Such a declaration would heighten the prestige and authority of leaders in the region, most importantly President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. Indeed, the key to a West African initiative will be Nigeria, the largest and most prestigious country in the region. Nigeria has only recently begun to emerge from a corrupt dictatorship that left the country bankrupt. But there are stirrings of revival. For instance, Obasanjo will hold the country's first successive democratic elections next year. The same way the IMF has created incentives for political and economic reforms in Turkey, the U.S. should hold out the carrot of a steadily deeper and more meaningful U.S-Nigerian partnership as the country liberalizes. The model to avoid is the Persian Gulf, where Western oil companies reaped huge profits but became complicit in the despotism and corruption of the area's regimes. West Africa needs a dose of benign paternalism. The debts carried by countries in the region should be relieved, but only if the governments meet certain benchmarks of reform. The U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act, which lifted American tariffs on African goods, should be expanded, and U.S. companies should be encouraged to form partnerships with non-governmental organizations to promote good governance. The key word in all this is "possibility." Sub-Saharan African production, now at almost 4 million barrels, could double to 8 million by 2006 (the Saudis are pumping 8 million now). If that seems optimistic, consider: Production in the Gulf of Mexico was tailing off in the late 1970s, but now is at an all-time high of roughly 2 million barrels a day; the North Sea was producing about 1 million barrels a day in 1977, but now is up to roughly 6 million barrels a day; Russia two years ago was dismissed as a basketcase, but is now producing 7 million barrels — without the benefit of much Western capital. As new sources of oil become available — including massive heavy-oil deposits in Canada and Venezuela that were considered useless before the advent of new technologies and that dwarf Saudi reserves — the Persian Gulf begins to look less important. Saudi Arabia's greatest asset, its reserves in the ground, becomes a depreciating one, as supplies steadily increase and prices drop. This means the U.S. is beginning to have the whip hand in dealing with the Saudis, if only the national-security establishment could break with its decades-old assumptions about a world energy market dominated by the Persian Gulf. OPEC served Washington well during the Cold War, as we used the Saudis to keep down the price of oil as a way of starving the Soviets of revenue. But the cartel should be scheduled for the ash heap just like the ABM treaty. The new U.S.-Russian entente is the first big step toward that post-OPEC world. Paul Michael Wihbey imagines OPEC's gradually being supplanted by a new oil bloc centered on the Atlantic (60 percent of U.S. oil now comes from countries bordering the Atlantic), with Russia as an important fellow traveler. West Africa is a natural part of this grouping, as off-shore Brazil and off-shore West Africa are part of the same geological basin. Eventually, the U.S. could create an Atlantic free-trade bloc in which the demand for energy is met in a self-contained area. Who knows? Some day, President Bush might stop inviting Saudi royals to lecture him at his Crawford ranch, and relax with the likes of President Olusegun Obasanjo instead. He might make more pleasant company. |
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decades, the U.S. has poured massive economic, military, and diplomatic
resources into developing and securing oil from the Persian Gulf. This
effort may have succeeded in guaranteeing (most of the time) affordable
oil in the West, but that hasn't stopped the region from becoming an increasingly
hostile cauldron of anti-American dictatorships. The U.S. would be well
advised to begin diverting some of its attention to a different gulf —
the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, a region that doesn't attract the headlines
of the Middle East or feature an influential cadre of diplomats, journalists,
and experts devoted to the idea of its eternal importance, but that can
still be a crucial piece of a new global U.S. energy strategy.
